Sunday, April 15, 2007

Day Four: NY Times Remains Silent

We're still awaiting that Times editorial about the gross miscarriage of justice down at Durham. We just know that the paper, when it finally gets around to setting the record straight, will point out that the three accused young men were excoriated precisely because of their race and class. They will go on to say that this happened because there are too many people who believe that the presumption of innocence is trumped by a jaundiced, ideological view of American society.

Or perhaps it won't go exactly like that, since the paper isn't really big on exhaustive self-criticism. It will probably go more like what we saw from the paper's ideological soul mates at the sister Boston Globe. The Globe, in what can only be characterized as re-victimization, told its readers the following" Three members of the Duke lacrosse team may have been louts, but all evidence suggests that they were not rapists."

Yet it was the rush to pigeonhole these Dukies as moral reprobates, a view that the Globe can't seem to leave alone, that paved the way for the malicious prosecution that followed. In contrast we have the response of Jemele Hill, an African-American female reporter for ESPN. Hill simply said: "I'm sorry." She did so because she said that true contrition should not be accompanied by rationalization of any kind.

The NY Times has a lot to be sorry for. Its Duff Wilson story in August should be put up for the Walter Duranty Pulitzer prize for dishonest reporting. The question remains why the paper couldn't do the kind of investigative reporting that the 60 Minutes people did, since that kind of real journalism would have easily exposed the entire hoax.

A few months ago the Times did an editorial on the release of a man from a Georgia prison for a false rape conviction, a conviction that was overturned because of DNA evidence. What a wonderful opportunity to weigh-in on the Duke travesty, since the editorial made so much about the need to better investigate rape allegations.

Instead we got, and continue to get, silence. If only George Bush and Alberto Gonzales could be worked into the narrative, we would be reviewing the fourth day of breathless front page stories and accompanying editorials. So we wait for the paper to finally chime in on all of this, days after its sanctimony about Don Imus. Imus' fall was a big piece of public redemption for the Rutgers women, a Times meaculpa, one that encompasses the entire shameless MSM performance in all of this, would at least provide a decent modicum of relief for the slander that the Duke men were forced to endure.